XANATOS: DETACHED
by ardavenport
~ ~ ~ PART 4
After his painful stroll with his old Master, Xanatos returned to his room. He longed to sleep to wake up again to his bland life in the morning, but their talk had poked a hot stick into his old wounds and he now had to drain the mental pus that had come out.
He settled on a cushion in his dark bare, empty room. And cleared his mind. Opening his vein of memories.
After the debacle on Telos, after he was celebrated as a hero for stopping a coup by killing his own father, after he had been knighted . . . . Xanatos had spent many painful hours in the dark desolate parts of his mind and wondered how Qui-Gon Jinn could have missed what his own Padawan really was for so long? How could he have missed the casual cruelties, the disdain for others, the uncompromising ambition? How could he have mistaken those for dedication to duty and Jedi detachment? For years?
Then, in the depths of his agony of post-patricide self-contemplation, Xanatos had met Qui-Gon Jinn's old Master. Dooku.
After that, everything became clear.
Throughout his apprenticeship with Qui-Gon, Xanatos had heard of his mentor's illustrious Master, the great diplomat and negotiator, Dooku, whose assignments rarely brought him to the Jedi Temple. He had asked Qui-Gon if they might meet someday, respectfully saying that he could learn so much from such a great Jedi. Qui-Gon would always shrug and say that if the Force willed their paths to cross then they would.
They didn't.
Xanatos had finally concluded that his Master was motivated to avoid Dooku because of some old friction between them. But he had been wrong, as he had been about so many things.
When he finally saw them together there was no animosity at all. They had simply become two people who no longer had anything in common.
Dooku had come to the Temple on his own business and only stopped by to view the wreckage of Xanatos, newly knighted apprentice of his first Padawan, Qui-Gon Jinn. Xanatos's spirit ebbed at such a low then that he did not care about being dispassionately analyzed by the older man.
Dooku was blunt and ruthless and heartless as he reviewed both Qui-Gon and Xanatos' faults. And he had been brutally correct in all his assessments. In the end, he congratulated Qui-Gon on achieving the rank of Master through his Padawan's elevation to Jedi Knight though he had clearly made the process more difficult than it needed to be. Then he left. Cold, impersonal, detached.
After an apprenticeship with this man, Qui-Gon's ability to discriminate between Jedi detachment and a complete lack of empathy for others would have been thoroughly deadened. Leaving a severe blind spot for the Jedi around him in a Knight who was otherwise superbly empathetic to any other beings through the Living Force.
Dooku had dispassionately pointed out this deficiency in Qui-Gon, emotionlessly noting that it resulted from his own teachings. Xanatos was not quite sure that Dooku wasn't a sociopath, but if he was the older man clearly had the discipline to manage it.
In his earlier life Xanatos had considered Dooku to be a model for what he wanted to be when he joined his father to overthrow the Telosian government. A great Jedi leader, manipulating events and people with his superior powers and intellect. For the greater good. He had imagined that Qui-Gon and Dooku would be proud of his accomplishment of so thoroughly sweeping away the old corrupt politicians on Telos.
Somehow, Xanatos had missed the fact that his own father was the oldest and most corrupted politician of them all.
Xanatos fell out of his meditation, losing his focus, feeling sick. His head ached and he slid down sideways to lay his cheek on the smooth cool floor.
Even after all these years he still had the same physical, visceral reaction to what he had done. What he had been. His life was bisected by what had happened on Telos.
Before Telos, he had been a confident, ambitious, intelligent, handsome, intuitive Jedi Learner. Superior in every way. Ready to become more than he was. Certainly more than what his Master had amounted to.
After Telos. . . . . his future was gone. Collapsed when his past fell in on him. His ambition shrank and shriveled under the blazing revelation of how petty and mediocre his schemes really were. And what they might have been.
What poisoned, twisted thing would he have become if he had not defended himself when his father flew into a rage, when his son objected to a plan to blame the unstable political situation on Qui-Gon Jinn, who had foolishly tried to stop the coup and been captured and wounded in the process?
Crion had un-holstered his sidearm and fired at Xanatos to shut up his arguments, probably knowing that a Jedi could easily brush aside the weapon fire. Probably. Crion did not tolerate dissent. He struck it down with his will and even blows for any wavering underlings. Crion always got his way.
Xanatos saw in his mind . . . . that one shot, deflected and ricocheting off of his lightsaber blade, his hand guided by unthinking instinct and the Force. Hitting Crion in the forehead, making a neat blackened circle right in the center. The body falling back onto the ornate rug of the family study, Crion's face frozen in an expression of total surprise.
Shocked, Xanatos had fallen back, staring at the bound, bleeding and unconscious body of his living Master. And then at the cooling body of his dead father, that hole in his forehead still smoking in the wavering yellow light of the study's huge fire alcove. He could smell the burnt flesh and brain.
Xanatos numbly did not respond to any com signals, his mind frozen on the impossibility of what had happened. Could it have been an accident? But there were no accidents with the Force. Never.
After a long, long time, a servant finally dared to open the door of the private study to discover the carnage within. Everything happened quickly after that. Medical droid for Qui-Gon. Ministers arriving. Scanners and lights. Examinations. Xanatos did not break out of his stupor until the celebrating started.
In the present, Xanatos lay on the floor of his lonely room in the Temple. In the past, ruthlessly replaying in his brain through the Force, one Telosian Minister had screamed, letting out a weird keening sound of pure emotion before she kicked Crion's lifeless body. The others stopped her. The body was removed, to take away the temptation for more abuse. The Ministers listened to Xanatos's blank retelling of everything that had happened. They ignored his complicity in the coup plot since he had struck the fatal blow that had freed them. He and Qui-Gon were kindly removed from the scene of the murder. The assassination. The liberation.
Outside the family estate, what little remained of Xanatos's self collapsed under the weight of the spontaneous celebration in the capital city. Lights came on, people shouted their joy, running in the streets, grabbing each other and crying. Everyone was so happy. It could hardly be contained. They shouted his name in praise.
'Xanatos! Xanatos! Xanatos!'
Xanatos was a hero.
After that, he did everything by rote. Eat, sleep, dress, wash. When Qui-Gon was recovered enough, they were sent back to Coruscant. Xanatos supposed that his Master had been concerned by his unresponsive state, but he didn't really remember. His first searing, coherent thought came when he and Qui-Gon presented themselves to the Jedi Council. Xanatos had fallen to his knees, sliding down onto the floor weeping. He was supposed to be a hero. A Jedi. But he had always been something very different, twisted and malicious like his father. And nobody ever told him.
He had become so incoherent that he was bodily removed from the Council Chamber. He remembered the faces, the heads of the Masters looking down, their hands on him, sinking into the total humiliation of his complete loss of control. Master Yoda, small and close to the floor, had looked closely at him with the empathy that Xanatos was now cursed with.
Alone in his room, curled up on the floor, he shivered, tormented by shame, by hopelessness, by despair that anything would ever matter to him again. Snippets of things he had done, memories of people, their faces, their words, fleshed out with larger meanings under his tightly closed eyes. Things that could never penetrate his old ambitions now stabbed deeply into him.
Finally his body unclinched, his past letting him go. Xanatos crawled to the sleep couch and fell into black, dreamless exhaustion.
The next morning, he got up and went back to his bland life, doing everything by rote.
A few days later Xanatos heard the news. Kenobi had called for help. Qui-Gon Jinn immediately left the Temple for Melida-Daan.
- ooOo%oOOo%oOOOOo%oOOo%oOoo -
Bruck Chun felt trapped. His thirteenth birthday was approaching. Two more of his clan mates had been chosen, changed from Initiates to Padawans by the assent of two willing Masters, leaving only those few, weak in the Force, who fatalistically accepted their eventual assignment to Agri-Corps. He never associated with rejects like them, but now they were the only ones left around him.
Hidden behind a row of bushes in the Room of a Thousand Fountains, alone from any prying eyes, he disconsolately looked down at the text of the com screen he held.
His father had sent his usual communication early. Among the family news and expressions of pride were some not-so-subtle inquiries about his status. Which Master had chosen him? There seemed to be no question that he would be a Jedi Knight. No room for escape. But Bruck knew that he had been chosen.
By Xanatos.
If the other Knights knew, they would not even consider him. Why bother, if Xanatos had already chosen him?
Bruck's heart beat faster in panic when he thought of the dingy workroom where he had found Xanatos directing cleaning droids with some smelly wrinkled old Master in a tatty robe. Cleaning up other people's garbage. Did that happen to all Jedi Knights when they got old? Or when they got crazy?
If he accepted Xanatos he would have to work there. No missions, no travels to other worlds, just endless days of drudgery at the bottom of the Jedi Order. Others would fulfill their destinies of adventure and excitement while he with his Master cleaned up after them.
He would be better off eating dirt in the Agri-Corps.
Almost.
Bruck froze when he heard the sound of other people. Familiar voices.
He cautiously peeked around the bush, looking up.
There was Qui-Gon Jinn. Tall, powerful, the kind of Knight who should have chosen him to be his Padawan.
Jinn bent forward, hand resting on another's shoulder and speaking softly, the words indistinct, but the tone gentle. The other person lifted his head . . .
. . . . Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Bruck quickly pulled back, fearful of being seen.
Kenobi was back. Qui-Gon Jinn's apprentice again.
Tucking the com screen away in his tunic, Bruck silently snuck away, creeping slowly until he was far enough away to run.
~ ~ ~ END PART 4